Ann-Shyn Chiang
Speaker of Workshop 1
Will talk about: Neuroinformatics of the Fly Brain
Ann-Shyn Chiang is one of Asia’s most distinguished neurobiologists. Born in Taiwan (1958), graduated from National Chung-Hsing University (1981), received M.S. from National Taiwan University (1983), obtained Ph.D. (1990) and trained as a postdoctoral fellow (1992) in Rutgers University, Chiang joined Department of Life Science, National Tsing Hua University as an associate professor (1992), promoted as professor (1997), took sabbatical to study Drosophila memory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (2001) and became the adjunct International Faculty of Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind (KIBM) at the University of California, San Diego (2011). For his outstanding contribution to our understanding of memory formation using a connectomics approach, Chiang has received many awards, including: Outstanding Research Award, National Science Council (2004, 2009, 2012), Outstanding Scholar Award, Foundation for the Advancement of Outstanding Scholarship (2007), Academic Award of Ministry of Education (2007), Outstanding Contributions in Science and Technology of Executive Yuan (2008), and TWAS Prize in Biology (2012). Chiang is currently the Dean of College of Life Science, the Director of Brain Research Center, the Distinguished Chair Professor of National Tsing Hua University and the Academician of Academia Sinica.
Animal behavior is governed by the activity of interconnected brain neurons. To understand how genes and circuits orchestrate complex behaviors in the fruit fly, we have previously generated a comprehensive brain wiring map containing specialized systems sketched by diversity of individual neurons. An open-access image database, named FlyCircuit, has been constructed for online data archiving, cell type inventory, browsing, searching, analysis, and 3D visualization of 16,000 single neurons in the standardized Drosophila brain [1,2]. Here, I announce the release of FlyCircuit 1.2 which has several new features: (1) added image data to 30,000 neurons; (2) assigned axon/dendrite polarity for each neuron; (3) created a sequence ID for each individual neuron by transforming 3D skeleton into 1D sequence for high throughput data mining; and (4) provide a novel image matching algorithm for searching genetic drivers containing specific target neurons [3]. I will also demonstrate how FlyCircuit helped us to study information flow [4] and memory formation [5] in the fly brain.
- Chiang AS, Lin CY, Chuang CC, Chang HM, Hsieh CH, Yeh CW, Shih CT, Wu JJ, Wang GT, Chen YC, Wu CC, Chen GY, Ching YT, Lee PC, Lin CY, Lin HH, Wu CC, Hsu HW, Huang YA, Chen JY, Chiang HJ, Lu CF, Ni RF, Yeh CY, Hwang JK (2011) Three-dimensional reconstruction of brainwide wiring networks in Drosophila at single cell resolution. Curr Biol 21, 1-11.
- Lin CY, Chuang CC, Hua TE, Chen CC, Dickson BJ, Greenspan RJ, Chiang AS (2013) A comprehensive wiring diagram of the protocerebral bridge for visual information processing in the Drosophila brain. Cell Rep 3, 1739-1753.
- Shih CT, Sporns O, Yuan SL, Su TS, Lin YJ, Chuang CC , Wang TY, Lo CC, Greenspan RJ, Chiang AS (2015) Connectomics-based analysis of information flow in the Drosophila brain. Curr Biol (in press).
- Lin HH, Chu LA, Fu TF, Dickson BJ, Chiang AS (2013) Parallel neural pathways mediate CO2 avoidance responses in Drosophila. Science 340, 1338-1341.
- Chen CC, Wu JK, Lin HW, Pai TP, Fu TF, Wu CL, Tully T, Chiang AS (2012) Visualizing long-term memory formation in two neurons of the Drosophila brain. Science 335, 678–685.
